Supernatural vs. The Dukes Of Hazzard: Which makes a better cartoon?

[TMC]

http://www.avclub.com/articles/super...makes-a,60860/

The Dukes aired in 1983, running for 20 episodes, spread across part of two Saturday-morning seasons. When The Dukes debuted, The Dukes Of Hazzard was in the middle of its fifth season and trending downward, in part because original stars Tom Wopat and John Schneider had left in a contract dispute, and in part because the whole handsome-rednecks-drive-real-fast genre was in decline. When The Dukes Of Hazzard first appeared in 1979, Burt Reynolds was one of the biggest box-office stars in America, and a decade of car-chase comedies had prepared the television audience for stories about colorful Southern boys dodging corrupt local lawmen. But by 1983, a condition called “Needham Fatigue” had set in.

The Dukes barely resembles the show that became one of the biggest TV hits of the early ’80s. Following the lead of its live-action counterpart, The Dukes featured the voices of Byron Cherry and Christopher Mayer as Coy and Vance Duke. (Schneider and Wopat later replaced them, voicing Bo and Luke after returning to the main show.) And though the cartoon Dukes still feud with Sheriff Coltrane and Hazzard County commissioner Boss Hogg, the action goes global, with the heroes and villains racing each other around the world. At times the show is a lot like Yogi’s Space Race, only with happy hicks instead of hat-sporting woodland creatures.

Like the various Yogi Bear shows, The Dukes was a Hanna-Barbera product, and it shows. The animation is painfully limited, and the art is dim and ugly (similar to Robert Smigel’s parodies on Saturday Night Live). The sound mix is even worse; the music is wall-to-wall, making the dialogue hard to hear. And the stories proceed from one comedy or action sequence to the next with very little connective tissue. The only reason I can think of that anyone would’ve watched this show back in 1983 would’ve been if they just liked to be reminded that The Dukes Of Hazzard existed. (It’s the same reason people put up posters or carried Dukes Of Hazzard lunchboxes.)

But how different are cartoons like The Dukes or The Brady Kids from something as ostensibly “cooler” as Supernatural: The Anime Series?

Stylistically, of course, they’re very different. The Dukes takes the already broadly comic The Dukes Of Hazzard and adds even more silliness: Boss Hogg making a typewriter noise while eating corn on the cob, Uncle Jesse talking to a mischievous raccoon, and so on. At their core though, both series are really just ancillary products. They’re souvenirs, not vital parts of the franchise. The same could be said of the various comic book versions of some TV shows (which exist in Supernatural’s case), or the “motion comic” versions of comic books (which the anime Supernatural resembles).